A Petri Dish clarifying his own thoughts while also analyzing the researcher. Exploration inspired by the book 'Being Different'. @IntegralUnity

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Analysis of History-Centrism - Part 2

In the first part, we analyzed a simple logical model of membership associated with a history-centric thought system (HCTS), a pivotal discovery of Rajiv Malhotra that is delineated in his amazing new book "Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism" where he has reversed the gaze on the west and analyzed their thought systems from an Indian perspective. Using even this simple model, we were able to show that duality, given HC, is a mathematical certainty. The sufficiency condition of the membership rule (which is also necessary) allows a great deal of flexibility and latitude in terms of how members can deal with members and non-members In this sequel, we consider additional implications and start to make statements on how their members are likely to interact with non-members, and comment on the stability of the membership.

Implication 4: History-Centrism implies Human-Centrism
Proof: result follows from the Separation Theorem in Part-1. (It is likely that at some point this human-centrism is practically interpreted as human supremacy over the universe). Similarly, HC also implies Geo-centrism. To analyze how such notions of duality affect the stability of their membership, we first define size:

Given a closed local population system of cardinality N that is in equilibrium, the size is defined as the fraction s (between 0 and 1.0) of the population that are members of a given HTCS

Membership Stability Postulate [work in progress]
If the material socioeconomic incentives and penalties for a local population are equal and independent of membership status, then the rate of change (s') with respect to time, is likely to be negative.

Proof: Since the beliefs in P cannot be verified at any point of time in future give the claim of a unique, non-reproducible event in the history, there is a non-zero probability = the fraction 0 < f/s <1 of the current members will reject the hypothesis of P at any point in time and become non-members in the absence of any penalty to leave or incentive to stay. In other words, a subset of members think of P as a Bayesian prior. Furthermore, there is no incentive gain for non-members (who by definition have rejected P) to satisfy the necessary condition. Consequently in such a scenario, the size asymptotically approaches zero.

Corollary: The membership size associated with a HCTS in such a decentralized scenario will never be in stable equilibrium.

Given this, the membership can let the HCTS die a natural death or mobilize (via a centralized authority) and attract new members to survive. How? An implication of the stability theorem is that the only viable alternatives are:
a. erect barriers to exit from membership
b. provide incentives to attract new members
c. increase the per-capita family size of members

Example: Christianity in the West and in India
In part-1 we showed that churches that subscribed to the Nicene creed belonged to one particular HTCS. The exit rate from such churches in the west is steady and given that:
a. There is little incremental social or financial incentive for westerners to rejoin the church, and
b. The chronic inability to re-enact the events of P to validate the claimed hypothesis,
has driven an ever increasing number of people in the west into Yoga-based, non-exclusive, non-HCTS systems that focus on the inner sciences, like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism (conjecture: most of them don't know they are H/B/J). The law of the land may stipulate that penalties for exit are illegal, and given that increasing family size is never really a scalable idea, the only viable option for survival is to focus on emerging markets.

A populous country like India that has only recently started re-developing its economy toward regaining its world market share that was sizable until 1750 CE (and then dwindled to near zero due to European colonialism). Consequently, today's India is characterized by significant variations in social and economic status and a lack of clarity and uniformity in laws concerning coerced conversions, thereby making it an attractive region for recruitment, regardless of the negative impact it has on the local culture and society (duality at work again!). Similar to the cost-driven advantage of outsourcing IT work to India-based companies, the church can make a dollar go much farther in India compared to the US or Europe. This move by the churches to expand its membership is laying the seeds for an active duality-driven conflict that existed in a 'cold-war' mode until recently.

Here's a link to an interesting geographical picture of the world religions in 1895:

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Dharampal

pic source: http://www.samanvaya.com/dharampal)

Gandhi's Hind Swaraj

Aurobindo

S. L. Bhyrappa

Original Indian Thinker & Author

Encouraging words from Sri Rajiv Malhotra

"This is the kind of scholar I have hoped to discover through mywritings and inspire. He has immersed himself into the history centrism thesis,then emerged with his own creative manthana based on it. He proposes novel ways of looking at it. All the blogs listed on the right margin are the product of original hard work and worth reading. My thanks go to him"